No Man’s Sky has been seeing a major uptick in player numbers since the title got its Voyagers update just last week. Hello Games founder Sean Murray has taken to social media platform X to celebrate the game hitting new heights in terms of concurrent players, noting that the game is getting the highest number of players since it first launched.
“Highest number of players since launch,” wrote Murray on X, along with a screenshot indicating that 97,986 people were playing No Man’s Sky. While the screenshot doesn’t specify which date saw this rise in concurrent players, a quick look at SteamDB would indicate that the game had hit a peak of 98,285 concurrent players earlier this week.
Going by Steam’s official listings, No Man’s Sky is currently sitting at the number 17 spot of the most-played titles on PC, with more than 50,000 current players and a 24-hour peak of 78,259 players. The game also struck a major return to the top sellers list, sitting at number 10 in the list between August 26 and September 2. When taking revenue into account, No Man’s Sky currently sits in the 9th place of the top 100 selling games right now.
The spike in player figures can likely be attributed to the Voyagers update, which brought with it a host of new features, like allowing players to create their own Corvette-class starship from scratch. The update also gave players more customisation options, including the ability to change up their ship’s living quarters and hull, among other things.
Along with this, Voyagers brought with it the ability for players to fly their Corvette-class starship into space, and then manually exit the starship, allowing players to simply float in space. This new feature even extends as far as allowing players potentially to dive from a starship orbiting a planet right onto the planet’s surface through the atmosphere, provided the player has appropriate means to survive the landing.
A major addition to the game thanks to the ability of players getting to build their own Corvette-class starships from scratch is the new mission board. Using it, players can now register for a mission as an entire co-op crew, allowing them to get rewards based on the missions they might find and complete in the local system.
The Voyagers update also brought in some new behind-the-scenes technology to improve the game’s performance, including support for Nvidia’s DLSS 4 technology. Those playing the title through PlayStation VR2 can also make use of the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution technology (PSSR) to get better image quality while maintaining high frame rates in their VR headset. The support for image upscaling technologies also extends to Intel’s XeSS 2.
No Man’s Sky is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and the Switch 2. The title was originally released all the way back in 2016, and at the time was met with a lukewarm critical reception. Despite this, and early complaints, Hello Games has continued to develop free updates for the game, making the No Man’s Sky of today essentially unrecognisable compared to the game’s state at launch.
